Finally, I've finished my re-reading of Jack London's The Sea-Wolf over the weekend.

I’d read the book, the Chinese version《海狼》, back to my junior high years when I was actually too little to fully absorb what Jack London could offer. But, the sailor’s adventurous life on high sea depicted in this book captured my immature yet daring heart, and opened a door for me to a world where the different sides of human nature - cruelty, savagery, brutality, violence, etc., dominates, totally opposite to the one constructed by reading those tender-hearted literatures. And in that sense, the book posed a moral challenge on my early perspectives of humanity, as I was so fascinated, yet more often puzzled, by the character of captain Wolf Larson. It provided me with a different angle through which I often mused over the meaning of life throughout my adolescent years.......

  Jack London (1876 - 1916)

Rereading this novel years later still proved to be an extraordinary thrilling voyage, and this was not much anticipated as I am no longer as adventure-longing as when I was a teenager. On a weekend a couple of weeks ago, I went to the city library in the hope to find the newly published Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri. After a careful search, in both sections marked J and L, of no avail, the front desk clerk, a demure-looking Caucasian woman upon consulting her computer, told me that the book was checked out and there were 14 people as of today on the waiting list. She arched her eyebrows as she spelled out the words, “fourteen people,” to emphasize the significance the number represents. Whoa!!! I know Jhumpa Lahiri has become a reading sensation ever since her very first book was published (I’ve read two of hers, The Namesake and Interpreter of Maladies, a winner of Pulitzer Prize for Fiction), but had no idea of she is THAT hot!

To offset this little reverse of my library quest and not to waste the trip, I went back to the shelves to resume my browsing and to see if anything could catch my eyes. This was when I spotted The Sea-Wolf, a century-old, yellowing color book squished between others – I was taken aback a bit to see it, just like you run into a long-time-no-see-friend in street then you need a little time to digest the unforeseen encounter. The sight of this book instantly conjured up an array of images in my head, 杰克伦敦，《海狼》，《荒野的呼唤》，《马丁·伊登》, etc., and harked me back to the memories associated with those simple, innocent, knowledge-thirsty teenager years when I read these classics of Jack London, among many other literature giants..........Seized by this nostalgia sentiment, I helplessly picked up the book that I have already read, an act conveying more ritual meaning than practical one.

The story, in this novel, is not multifaceted, nor complex-devised. Rather, it has lineal and simple structure, just like Jack London’s other works all with emphasis on characters more than on plot. It evolves around three main characters: captain Wolf Larson, Humphrey Van Weyden, an amateur literature critic and also the narrator of the story, and Ms. Maud Brewster, a female poet. Humphrey is a unworldly, soft, humble, a bit meek, almost a feminine-like scholar who's got rescued from the sea in the San Francisco Bay by a seal-hunting schooner, Ghost, captained by Wolf Larson, after the ferryboat Humphrey is riding on collides with another vessel and sinks. But, what Humphrey does not know is his "rebirth", from being drown at sea, is actually just the beginning of an infernal journey that would totally change his life.

As an absolute tyrant of the ship, captain Wolf Larson's ruling over his sailors is beyond being atrocious, cruel and barbarous, and Humphrey is no exception. On board, Humphrey is forced to do tedious, menial work as a cabin boy, and anything done does not tally with Wolf’s request, he will get beaten up; to make the things worse, he in the meantime has to fight the other savagery crew whenever there arises a conflict. Later on when Ghost picks up another survivor, a female poet Ms. Maud Brewster, in the Japanese sea, both Humphrey and Wolf fall in love with this beautiful, intelligent woman. In an attempt to escape from Wolf, Humphrey and Maud end up, en route out, on Endeavor Island due to a storm. Just when they think they’re finally out of hell, Wolf arrives, as well, on the island as Ghost is wrecked in the storm and finds the island an anchorage.

Though suffering from blind and paralysis, and with all the crew left him, Wolf does not change at all and only goes all lengths to stop Humphrey’s efforts to repair the ship and leave the island; while Humphrey and Maud, instead of taking the advantage of his physical condition, take care of the ailing, crippled Wolf until his very last minute. After Wolf’s burial at sea, Humphrey and Maud are rescued by a US revenue cutter. A happy ending for the loved ones!

There is no doubt that the deep character of captain Wolf Larson, as a main accomplishment in this book, is one of the most iconic figures ever created in the American literature history, and it is the psychological complexity of this character that makes this book a remarkable read. The portrait of captain Wolf Larson is so astonishing that it never ceases to inspire readers over the last one hundred years. Sophisticated as this character may be, Wolf Larson is one grotesque combination of many elements: brutality, maliciousness, cynical and inhuman. He reviles anything related to religion and does not believe in the immortality of soul. He has tremendous physicality by which he crushes anybody who stands in his way. On the other hand, he is intelligent, knowledgeable and well-learned. He can talk about Darwin, Nietzsche and Herbert Spencer, looking like a well-established scholar at one minute, then viciously beat people up like an animal the next. In nature, he is anti-society and anti-civilization. As Jack London describes:

“Sometimes I think Wolf Larson mad, or half-mad at least, what of his strange moods and vagaries. At other times I take him for a great man, a genius who has ever arrived. And, finally, I am convinced that he is the perfect type of the primitive man, born a thousand years or generations too late and an anachronism in this culminating century of civilization. He is certainly an individualist of the most pronounced type. Not only that, but he is very lonely.”

Clearly what Jack London tried to explore, in the accounts of the terrifying character of Wolf Larson, are the evil sides of human being, the dehumanized parts of humanity in their extreme forms. To do that, the setting where the story unfolds is wisely, and conveniently too, set on a ship. No place better than a ship for that matter as a ship, isolated from society and surrounded by water, is like a stage that is immune from the binding force of legal system, from the constraining of all social norms, thus it enables Jack London to have his character opening up his immoral, uncivilized facets to the full, without being restrained by any morality.

As the captain, Wolf is literally the God of his little kingdom in the way he maneuvers the lives of those sailors onboard. He is the law, as well as the enforcer of the law. He would, with his wisdom and superb physical strength, defeat anyone who shows even the slightest sign of rebellious intention against his will, or be in a smallest disagreement with him, and even kill someone who has a courage to defy him. And more interestingly, he thinks what he does, no matter how cruel and ruthless, can be justified by Darwin’s theory of natural selection - the one who is stronger and fits the environment always prevails, no matter what it takes. As Wolf argues,

“I believe that life is a mess, ........It is like yeast, a ferment, a thing that moves and may move for a minute, an hour, a year, or a hundred years, but that in the end will cease to move. The big eat the little that they may continue to move, the strong eat the weak that they may retain their strength. The lucky eat the most and move the longest, that is all.”  

In Humphrey's eyes, as Jack London puts it, Wolf is in a way a primitive man anachronistically living in a civilized society:

What I mean is that it was the face of a man who either did nothing contrary to the dictates of his conscience, or who had no conscience. I am inclined to the latter way of accounting for it. He was a magnificent atavism, a man so purely primitive that he was of the type that came into the world before the development of the moral nature. he was not immoral, but merely unmoral.

However, what makes the Wolf’s character most fascinating is not just the accounts of how he acts being barbaric, primitive and atavistic; quite the contrary, it’s the sides of his intelligence, eruditeness and resources that set this evil hero apart. Over the course of my reading, one thing I often marveled at is the reason why Jack London intended to create this misshapen character besides its theatrical effect. Looking back the literature history, there are no shortage of heroes who command super physicality, yet a hero combining both super physicality and extraordinary brainpower is a true rarity. No doubt the character of Wolf holds a special place in literature history. It seems, in Wolf, what Jack London also seeks to model after is Friedrich Nietzsche’s superman, or inspired by, to say the least, even though he himself never claims so. As Nietzsche expounds that “The Superman” is perfect in both mind and body, who is unmatched in strength and intelligence, and also not encumbered by religious or social mores. Obviously, Jack London’s description of Wolf Larson fits right into Nietzsche’s concept. To put it differently, Jack London, in the character of Wolf Larson, tried to embody Nietzsche’s concept of superman, in doing so he successfully transformed the philosophical concept into a vivid literature image.

What’s also captivating is the dynamic relationship between Wolf Larson and Humphrey. In The Sea-Wolf, these two characters philosophically symbolize the two dimensions on the scale of the human nature: barbarity and civility. They conflict and collide each other anywhere and everywhere, and yet there are some compromises entwined between all these life-and-death conflicts from the very beginning to the end. When Humphrey is picked up by Wolf’s ship, Wolf sort of becomes his life savior, and earns his respect and admiration.    

“When I finished the bed, I caught myself looking at him in a fascinated sort of way. He was certainly a handsome man - beautiful in the masculine sense.”

But in Wolf’s eyes, when they first met, Humphrey is nothing but a useless bookworm, a low thing on the food chain placed by the “natural selection” process. Nonetheless, as their story opens out Wolf realizes that Humphrey actually is the only one onboard with whom he could strike an intelligent conversation, covering the subjects like literature, fine arts, religion and philosophy. Humphrey’s articulated intelligence obviously provides a great comfort for Wolf's civil side and brings him certain satisfaction; albeit there is seldom one thing upon which they could agree, in most case due to Wolf’s extreme stubbornness, hedonism and moral nihilism. For Wolf, he, in the savagery world he reigns, needs a right person, well-educated and intelligent like Humphrey, to exalt himself by ridiculing Humphrey and the morals of society. That’s probably the only reason to explain why Humphrey survives on the ship while others die. All these intelligent conversations, between Wolf and Humphrey, earn them a great deal of respect for each other. Thus, as much as Humphrey hates Wolf, he has to admit: Wolf "opened up for me the world of the real, of which I had known practically northing and from which I had always shrunk.” In that sense, they become sort of “bosom friends”.

Adding a great complexity to the rivalry between these two men is a woman. In the later part of the story, their bond becomes more intrigued when the beautiful female poet Maud is picked up at sea and joins the crew. Wolf and Humphrey develop into the rivals in love as they both, charmed by Maud’s beauty and literary talent, fall in love with her. The competition makes Humphrey becoming gallantry, mature and in a way makes him a real man who can finally stand up and confront with the evil Wolf. It is the very attempt to protect Ms. Maud from Wolf that enables Humphrey to brave the great danger of fleeing, with Maud, in a small boat and to endure a horrifying ocean storm.

Overall, Maud is not a central figure in the book, nor did Jack London spend much length on her until later on. It is obvious that the portraying of Ms. Maud, the only female character in the novel, is not as successful as that of Wolf and Humphrey. So, the love story pales in a savagery world, a real man’s world. But it’s utterly telling that Jack London’s depiction of this woman is teemed with his passion and love. The following passage is among my favored accounts of how Jack London describes Maud Brewster:

She was a delicate, ethereal creature, swaying and willowy, light and graceful of movement. It never seemed to me that she walked, or, at least, walked after the ordinary manner of mortals. Hers was an extreme lithesomeness, and she moved with a certain indefinable airiness, approaching one as down might float or as a bird on noiseless wings.

What an image of a fine woman!

In the end, Wolf Larson died. Amid the struggle of his health and the fighting with his adversaries, both Humphrey and Maud, he refuses to be saved and to receive any help, he wants to die on the island that is thousands miles away from his country, away from society, away from civilization. He died like a wild wolf in his solitary, quietly in the wilderness; yet, his evil spirit is still echoing in the immense void between the sky and earth, reminiscent of the long howling of a lonely wolf that reigns the dark night in a vast champaign..........

Jack London’s tone, throughout the book, seems clam and sober-minded, seldom showing emotion. He tells the story with great placidity, staying aloof from whatever happens in that cruel world. But, in the ending part of the novel, his emotion, through the narrator, gushes at Wolf’s dying. Hence it kind of gives out a hint of Jack London’s affection for this character. I would like to end this essay with Jack London’s own words of Wolf Larson's death.

The man of him was not changed. It was the old, indomitable, terrible Wolf Larsen, imprisoned somewhere within that flesh which has once been so invincible and splendid. Now it bound him with insentient fetters, walling his soul in darkness and silence, blocking it from world which to him had been a riot of action. No more would he conjugate the verb "to do" in every mood and tense. “To be” was all that remained to him - to be, as he had defined death, without movement; to will, but not to execute, to think and reason and in the spirit of him to be as alive as ever, but in the flesh to be dead, quite dead.

It was like a message from the night of the grave; for this man’s body had become his mausoleum. And there, in so strange sepulture, his spirit fluttered and lived. It would flutter and live till the last line of communication was broken, and after that who was to say how much longer it might continue to flutter and live?

The last line was down. Somewhere within that tomb of the flesh still dwelt the soul of the man. Walled by the living clay, that fierce intelligence we had know burned on; but it burned on in silence and darkness. And it was disembodied. To that intelligence there could be no objective knowledge of a body. It knows no body. The very world was not. It knew only itself and the vastness and profundity of the quiet and the dark.